In the first part of last year, a quarter of our coronavirus cases were non Malaysians — see pie chart below (segment in red).
The figures are sourced from a 17 Nov 2020 research paper in The Lancet titled ‘Clinical characteristics and risk factors for severe Covid-19 infections in Malaysia: A nationwide observational study’.
The import of foreign workers only benefits the barons of Big Business who increase their profit margins as they’re paying less for labour.
Bearing the cost is our healthcare system, among other sectors.
Foreigners with Covid are put in Malaysian hospitals for treatment, leading to our medical frontliners facing more risk exposure numerically.
These foreigners are also going to be getting the vaccine, paid for by Malaysian government presumably.
Aside from monetary cost, there is a social cost too. Yesterday I said the four suspects (below) detained by Thai authorities “don’t look Malaysian to me”.
There are those like Kit Siang who insist ‘diversity is an asset‘. I don’t think so.
BELOW: Can one say that some people look Malaysian and others don’t?
From my earlier blog posts
It’s a topic I’ve covered previously but I just want to do a quick recap.
The Burmese consider its unwanted people as ‘Bengali’ whose forefathers were imported from Bengal for cheap labour to work the British colonial economy.
This group, however, call themselves Rohingya and claim they’re indigenous with a thousand year-long history in Arakan (the old name for Rakhine).
There are true Rohingya but their numbers are small. Take the following analogy.
There is a very, very small community of Baba Nyonya here who can trace their history back 600 years to the Malacca sultanate.
BELOW: Sleight-of-hand claim of “almost six centuries” involvement made by Sin Chew — see screenshot of relevant paragraph in box
It is a mistake to imply (‘overstate’) the number who can trace a connection to Ming Dynasty times. And it is a bad ploy to downplay that the fact that bulk of Chinese immigration occurred before the Japan-China war. I’M LOOKING AT YOU, SIN CHEW!
Be honest — statistics don’t lie
The vast majority of Chinese today in Malaysia, however, are descended from immigrants who came during British times. Read my blog post — ‘2.3 million Chinese came to Malaya in the 1920s’.
And the country population was only 3.8 million in the census year of 1931. So two-plus million Chinese immigrants is a big number.
Imagine if all the Chinese Malaysians now were to insist on calling themselves Baba Nyonya and proceed to claim a collective history of more than half a millennia in this land. Not true, right?
Yet this is the strategy the Rakhine Bengalis have used. They’re hijacking the term ‘Rohingya’ which was only popularized for use as a political tool in the 1960s.
As it is, the Bengali aka Rohingya were already disliked by Myanmar’s majority Bamar ethnic. Playing on a political strategy that, by Bumese general consensus, was regarded as buat cerita and deceitful merely compounded the dislike.
The atrocities against Rohingya were committed by soldiers and not by Aung San Suu Kyi nor her political party nor her government. But neither side – military or civilian – has any sympathy for the Rohingya.
A takeaway from the Myanmar lesson — an ‘invented’ bangsa narrative as a political weapon will backfire.
Guan Eng is forever complaining that non Malays are treated like “second-class citizens”
The 95% Chinese viewpoint
Sin Chew Daily published an editorial today headlined ‘We’re not pendatang!’
Sin Chew‘s take on “demonstrations against the migrants, including the Syrian refugees flooding Europe, the Rohingyas from Myanmar, as well as Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s and 80s” is worth your time to read.
Helen Ang 